There’s normally a list of them on the product label. In very small print, to deter consumers from reading it. Not that they need worry: just about nobody has time to do the research required to get an inkling about what function they are meant to perform.

You'll have to do better than that. That's a huge claim you've just handwaved away with an argument from ignorance - they're in tiny writing and people don't understand what they're for, therefore they're mind control chemicals. Which additives, and what function do they perform. Supported by links to reputable journals if you've got them.

Actually, I don't have to. I really don't care how much you misinterpret what I wrote. Writing about such chemical experimenting on consumers, I actually referred to an addling of the brain. Old-fashioned language for people unable to think clearly - nothing to do with mind control. And it was a flippant surmise, not expecting any reader to assume it was more than partly true.

We don't know how such additives affect us. Neither the govt nor the manufacturers are even slightly interested in spending the money it takes to find out. When Muldoon was PM I was given the task of conducting a survey of lead pollution in Auckland city, which included writing in my report the primary finding from similar research overseas. The most interesting of those was that the populace in countries on western manufactured food diets already had blood lead levels substantially over the World Health Organisation safe level. Lead causes degeneration of the nervous system (of which the primary organ is the brain). I wondered how Muldoon would react to this news: he disestablished the Environmental Laboratory of the Health Dept (my employer) the following year - a subtle yet effective way of shooting the messenger.

Fortunately I had already moved on to running an alternative rock music venue, and the lead solder that was traditionally used to join the tin fruit cans (and poison everyone's blood) was phased out within a few years. Not all capitalists are evil - many are just lazy & delinquent - just as many are worthy citizens...

it was a flippant surmise, not expecting any reader to assume it was more than partly true.

Given that we are currently in a situation where for every every one sober, considered summary of the current cold, methodical, peer-reviewed science as a signal, we have approximately one trillion graduates of google school and youtube university thinking they know better and drowning us with their noise, you can understand why some folk get a bit chippy, no?

What makes me chippy is the extent to which educated progressive folks direct their energy into dead ends like fluoridation and anti GM and so on when there are real issues that affect real people that they could be directing their passion and advocacy and so on into.

If you're not going to bother standing behind your partly untrue words, then you don't deserve the compliment of rational debate.

Now you've got me interested. There's a part of the blogoshere where people actually conduct a rational debate? Tell us where. As an amateur sociologist, I'd be fascinated to observe the denizens of that social ecosystem doing their thing.

Experiments that introduce a foreign ethos into a cultural niche tend to end badly. Probably due to the instability inherent in complex systems: they can take off suddenly on radically different trajectories in response to a tiny stimulus.

You could argue that the natives in this cultural niche wouldn't find rationality stimulating & I'd suspect you'd be proven correct in the experiment, however some would think they'd been abducted by aliens during the night and dropped down on a different planet and traumatising people is cruel. Not to mention the cost of counselling. No, it'd be better to be an observer in such a cultural niche that has evolved naturally...

The quantum physicists say that pure status will be difficult to achieve , and there is still uncertainty.Total immersion while maintaining self-awareness may be a useful strategy ; possibly the best that we can do.Sounds easy enough :-)

There has been a gazillion reckons on what the lessons of Brexit and Trumpocalypse are. One of the reckons that resonated most with me was the summary that old political tropes of left v right no longer apply. It's insider v outsider, city v country, success v failure .....

Indeed. I meant a participant observer. Graduated BSc in phiysics myself long ago. I often reflect on being told at college in '65 (physics intro) that the theory of the subject had been erected on the basis of metaphysics. Such intellectual honesty would be impossible nowadays due to subsequent decades of dumbing down & pc mind control (I presume). But the teacher was careful to refrain from drawing the obvious analogy to building a castle on a foundation of sand. No point spooking the horses (students) while they are being trained to pull civilisation forward into the future.

The metaphysical relevance to fake news lies in relativity. All one need do is apply it as a metaphysical principle (as in `all meaning is relative to context'). So whereas postmodernism tried to persuade people that facts don't exist, only opinions, and tradition says they coexist, a metaphysician would assert that the difference between fact and opinion depends on the social context of the user. Thus culture: things seem factual when you're in a group that beliieves it.

Reality is socially constructed via consensus. Physicists proved that absolute reality doesn't exist almost a century ago, but we cc-create consensus around the elements of our natural & social environment and they seem relatively real as a result. Thus children naturally take as real the world-view they acquire via enculturation. Culture wars emerge as the natural consequence of competing groups, which leads us into group selection, a topic for another day...